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The Aridhia Network Effect
When you sign up to use the Aridhia DRE (Digital Research Environment) – you are signing up to more than a software platform. You’re joining a community, a network of like-minded teams working together on common goals, be it finding new treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease, Liver Cancer, or revolutionising paediatric medicine and precision dosing.
As a platform owner, when you invite users to your Aridhia DRE, you’re not just hosting a software platform: you’re enabling collaboration across a broad global scientific community, providing them curated high quality datasets, secure governance and an unprecedented opportunity to collaborate and innovate.
The Azure-hosted Aridhia DRE platform is the backbone of this collaboration, providing the administration, tools, hooks, and APIs to allow geographically dispersed teams to work in a secure and always available environment. You don’t run the DRE all by yourself – Aridhia’s managed service ensures continuity of service, rapid start up and smooth user onboarding.
The Aridhia Network
Now, customers can choose to add their DRE instance to what we call ‘The Aridhia Network’. The Aridhia Network will allow platform owners and data contributors to safely share their data wider than ever before. Often, sensitive data cannot move beyond certain boundaries, making data sharing difficult – particularly in the area of rare diseases. To help overcome this challenge, Aridhia has (as a partner in the PHEMS project) developed the Federated Node. This will allow data controllers hosting data in one DRE platform to grant federated access to members of another DRE platform and vice-versa, setting up those connections and opportunities for exciting new discoveries.
Through our customers and partners, there are currently 21 DRE Hubs located around the world, from Australia, through Europe, the UK and the US. Those Hubs support data contributions from 89 countries, run nearly 900 workspace projects, and support a diverse community of clinical scientists, data scientists and life science researchers from hospitals, academia, pharma and biotech. Our customers are always the controllers of their data and their outcomes. Aridhia is the data processor that makes data discoverable and accessible through customised approval workflows and provides safe, secure collaboration workspaces fully-loaded and integrated with open-source tooling while allowing researchers to bring their own code, tools, and pipelines as required.
Our evolving API capabilities offer new integration opportunities, with our customers taking full advantage of these right now. Notably, the European Platform for Neurodegenerative Diseases provides seamless integration with the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative ‘AD Workbench’ platform, providing truly cross-continental connectivity.
The Aridhia Network Effect
Each of these can benefit from The Aridhia Network Effect in five ways:
Collaborations and Data Sharing
As researchers and data controllers join a DRE enabled network, the platform becomes a hub for diverse, high-quality datasets and expertise. Our customers have formed communities of these researchers (e.g. ADConnect) fostering collaboration and sharing of insights. Researchers can broadcast their outcomes and work to others within the community, share models, code and even data securely through FAIR Data Services.
Enhanced Data Quality and Variety
As more users contribute data, a positive feedback loop occurs, improving the quality of datasets and leading to combined, novel datasets. The allows for more comprehensive and multi-modal data analysis and more robust findings and outcomes.
Improved Tools and Resources
With more data and more researchers comes the demand for more tools, resources and compute capacity. The DRE supports flexible compute demands and a wide variety of tools for large scale and multi-modal analysis. Some of those can be found here. This is a continuous improvement cycle, providing access to cutting edge technology and methodologies.
Federated Data Access
The recently announced Federated Node, developed as part of the PHEMS project, allows the DRE-based network to communicate even wider, either connecting DREs to each other, or, due to the open-source nature of the Federated Node, connecting DREs to completely different platforms, where the common need is to securely share and control access to sensitive data across boundaries.
Standardisation and Interoperability
As the network grows, it drives standardisation in data formats and analysis methods, making it easier for researchers to collaborate and share results. Data in standardised formats such as OMOP enables researchers to interoperate and standardise on tooling, while making traditionally siloed data widely available. Cross-dataset cohorts become possible, leading to the creation of novel datasets and improved outcomes.
Benefits of Bridging the Gap
The Aridhia Network Effect, with the DRE as the backbone, leads to a virtuous cycle of increased collaboration, improved data quality, enhanced tooling and methodologies, and greater overall value for all users and data owners. You can benefit from this now either by making your data available to work within our secure TRE environment, opening up the opportunity to share with other TRE users in a direct or federated way, within or across organisational boundaries, or you can deploy your own unique dedicated enterprise-scale DRE platform node with your data assets ready to go, enabling unprecedented connectivity, collaboration, and scientific innovation.